Biodiversity change amidst disappearing human traditions and changing socio-economics

We are living amidst humanity’s largest ever migration, with more people leaving rural areas for urban centers than ever before. In less than 50 years, rural populations have decreased by 25%, creating demographic deserts and land no longer cultivated, with unknown consequences for nature and society. In this project, we will bring together ecology, data science, remote sensing, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to shed new light on the interactions between humans and biodiversity. Going beyond mainstream ecology which focuses predominantly on species and their environment, the research will reveal how human migration and changing values and traditions influence biodiversity and what that means for nature conservation, human quality of life and likelihood of re-migration to rural areas. In a first work package, the focus will be on Bulgaria – the quickest depopulating country in the world with a decrease of 9 to 6.5 million people between 1990 and 2021 – to conduct field studies across 30 villages spanning a gradient of depopulation. Second, we will mobilize and collate open-access data to lead a global synthesis of the impacts of changing socio-economics, such as aging rural populations, political shifts and human conflict, on biodiversity change over space and time. The outputs of the research will capture both detailed relationships among abandonment, human culture and biodiversity, and broad-scale biodiversity patterns in a rapidly changing world. The findings will determine whether villages are a refuge or an abyss for nature and people and chart new pathways for reimagining rural areas as sanctuaries for culture, traditions, and biodiversity.

Involved researchers: Gergana Daskalova, Johannes Kamp

This research is funded by a Branco-Weiss-fellowship to Gergana Daskalova.